January Project Update

Over the last 3 weeks our team had the opportunity to meet and prepare a couple upcoming projects for our students. Our new Science 8 and Social Studies 7 teacher had an opportunity over the winter break to take an iPad home and play around with the different apps. She felt this was a good chance to test out an iPad as she had never used one in a classroom setting before, especially not with her students. We decided we were going to co-teach and have students create different presentations using the information they had learned while researching their topic. The students were going to choose how they were going to demonstrate their learning, whether it be by creating a movie, ebook, podcast or some other type of presentation.

In Science 7, students were researching different Biomes located around the world. Students needed to create a map of the area covered by their chosen Biome, discuss some of the species native to the area and create a food web as well as a food chain. Students enjoyed learning more about the different Biomes. For the projects, students determined how they wanted to present their learning to the rest of the class. We showed the students a couple of examples from previous years, but unfortunately, this caused the students to move away from their own ideas and use the same or similar formats from the examples to create their project. I find this common when giving students choice, but showing them examples of other projects. Students are less likely to take risks and more likely to copy the format of one of the other projects that have been deemed successful. Most students choose to use Explain Everything to complete the project. Another skill, our students will continue to work on when creating presentations, is not using too much text. Often in their presentations, they will type out a paragraph on their slides and then proceed to read every word while presenting. This is not an effective presentation and we will continue to work on this skill.


Here are a couple of examples of presentations created by our students: